The newly respectable Minister Farrakhan
An antisemitic, conspiracy-theorist cult leader has been given cover by people who should know better.
The debates are over for 2020. Thank God.
I’m concerned that expectations for Trump were so low that any improvement in his performance at all will help him. He was still terrible last night, but not as bad as he was during the first debate. Graded on a curve - and not counting the fact that almost every word out his mouth was a lie - he did better.
Biden also improved on his performance in the first debate, and it was nice to see some righteous anger from him, especially when Trump tried to deflect from over 500 children still separated from their parents after they crossed the border. I do think his answer about transitioning from the oil industry might hurt him with some voters, though.
Am I alone in thinking moderator Kristen Welker didn’t do a great job? So much for that mute button they were going to use this time around.
An editorial in the Jewish publication Tablet warns against normalizing frothing antisemitic cult leader Louis Farrakhan:
One thing irresponsible actors on both sides of the political spectrum now agree on—perhaps the only thing—is that the medieval bigot Louis Farrakhan and his followers are serious people who “represent” or can “speak for” black America.
And the poison is spreading.
It is being spread by Donald Trump, now partnering with rapper and Farrakhan fan Ice Cube, who enjoys tweeting anti-Semitic memes and images, like one depicting Jewish bankers seated around a Monopoly board resting on the backs of Black men. It is being spread by Barack Obama, headlining an event with the discredited Women’s March leader and Farrakhan acolyte Tamika Mallory. And it is being spread by the editors of The New York Times, who this weekend ran a fawning op-ed about the women behind Farrakhan’s Million Man March without so much as a nod to his overt and grotesque bigotry--which led the late John Lewis to boycott the event. When Jewish readers expressed anguish at this whitewashing, the author of the piece took to Twitter to tell them to stop “centering” themselves in this conversation. Can you imagine that being said by a contributor to the Times to any other minority group targeted for violence? And in the very year when there was a mass murder of Jews perpetrated by someone driven by the ideas that Farrakhan promotes?
It’s almost like that tweet was designed to prove a point Bari Weiss made (also in Tablet) about left-wingers increasingly throwing Jews under the bus:
It should go without saying that, for Jews, an ideology that contends that there are no meaningful differences between cultures is not simply ridiculous—we have an obviously distinct history, tradition and religion that has been the source of both enormous tragedy as well as boundless gifts—but is also, as history has shown, lethal.
By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”
This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: “This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,” and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.
That’s always been the way, hasn’t it? Communists hate Jews for being capitalists. Nazis hate Jews for being Communists. Nationalists hate Jews for being “globalists” who want to erase national borders. “Anti-Zionists” hate Jews for being nationalists who support the state of Israel. Racists hate Jews for not being white. And a growing number of people, schooled in critical race theory, hate Jews for being white.
By the way, the Nation of Islam has teamed up with the Church of Scientology in recent years. Science-fiction cults gotta stick together.
Related: a Canadian self-professed “human rights defender” holds one particular ethno-religious group responsible for all the problems in the world. Guess which group.
The short-form mobile streaming service Quibi is dead after only seven months. Even Shomi lasted longer. The price tag: $1.4 billion dollars.
IndieWire has an obituary:
New reasons why Quibi struggled seemed to arrive every day, but the core problem comes back to a misunderstanding of how modern audiences watch TV (or movies, or “content,” or Quibis — aka “quick bites”). Quibi was marketed as a streaming service to be consumed casually, where subscribers would watch episodes while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting for the bus. But a plethora of free services already offer those distractions (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) and social media can be a similar (free) time-filler with the added (free) benefit of interactivity. (Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, and more all stream videos in one way or another, while letting you talk to your friends, favorite celebrities, or brands.)
Even if people did prioritize Quibi over other apps, what happens when your mobile-only service is being sold to an immobile world? Quibi was designed to be used by on-the-go millennials, but launched on April 6, 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic which forced many television viewers indoors where they had access to other streaming services on larger screens. The streaming service also lacked key features at launch, such as the ability to screenshot or cast Quibi’s programming to televisions via tech such as AirPlay and Chromecast.
The pandemic didn’t help Quibi — but it also can’t be considered the reason for its failure. People often watch programs while doing something else, or even watching other programs. Anyone who may have wanted to watch “The Fugitive” remake while texting with friends had to choose one or the other. That design flaw made Quibi’s competitors insurmountable; not only do subscribers have to value Quibi enough to pay the monthly fee, they have to value it over every other app and opportunity offered on their phone.
Frankly, if my nine year-old’s viewing habits are any indication, all paid streaming services - yes, even Netflix and Disney+ - are doomed. 99% of what he watches is free on YouTube. (Mostly people playing video games. Kids today, man.) If I were going to bet on one to survive in the long run, it’s probably Amazon Prime, which gives you free delivery on your Amazon purchases along with The Grand Tour.
The people who posted this on Facebook said it would take ages to get, and they were right:
People such as Aliyah Hasan or Louis Farrakhan stirring up hatred against others without any apparent regard for facts or historical evidence make me question whether they have ever been directly on the receiving end of the thoughtless, self-justifying and seemingly unstoppable hatred that people will display towards anyone who is different. It’s a very base instinct to elevate oneself by beating others down. Jewish people are not caught as unawares or defenceless nowadays as in the Holocaust. But anyone who tells themselves that “surely it can’t be that bad” or “the worst won’t happen” only needs to read the news to figure out that fanning hatred can and will cause potentially serious harm to people if left unchecked. People who would turn out not to be all that different if one actually bothered to look. But the real point of hate-mongering is to find a common target. It’s about strengthening one’s own base by creating an enemy to persecute.
Socialization via online media has its upsides and downsides. My autistic kid is up to date on whatever his age group is into, which translates into an ability to socialize face to face as well because he shares the same knowledge base and has lots of practice talking to others online. This exposes him to a much broader base of opinions and information sources than face to face interaction. But that exposure is modulated by the experience of and thoughtful conversations with multiple adults to provide perspective and get him thinking more deeply about what he sees and hears in the online world.
Ultimately, being available for our kids to share their thoughts and experiences with us and giving them thoughtful feedback about what is happening in their lives is more important now than ever, because their online world is huge and the only way to be safe in it is to learn from the ground up how to approach it meaningfully. It offers more, but can also go the wrong way more quickly. The solution is to be not just physically, but mentally present in our kids’ lives and really hear what they are saying when they share things with us; to catch things before they go wrong and be part of the enthralling experience of watching them grow and learn. Their world is less safe in some ways, but can also be richer.